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Happy book deal news! (TINY book deal news…sorry so small! Click to enlarge!)

So, if you saw the announcement of my recent sale to Riptide, you might be interested in the longer version of the story, which is also, functionally, an update on my 2017 publishing schedule. Many of you know bits and pieces of this, but here’s the full story.

I’m super excited to announce the FAMOUS books!

In May 2017 (exact date TBA), I’ll be independently publishing book 1, FAMOUS, a m/f novel about a mega-famous pop star having an existential crisis who bolts from her manager and ends up hiding out with a nerdy art history professor in a small Iowa college town. (Could Totally Happen.)

On November 28, 2017, Riptide will publish book 2, INFAMOUS, a m/m novel about a bad-boy rock star and a workaholic doctor who both have really good reasons to stay away from each other (we all know how that’s gonna end, yes?).

Each book is a true standalone—there are no overlapping characters—operating at the intersection of romance and fame. For now, there are only two books in this series, but I hope to expand it (boy band reunion on a cruise ship, anyone?). I just need to figure out how to manipulate space and time to make this happen.

This series is mixed in two ways. First, it mixes m/f romance and m/m romance. If you’re familiar with my 49th Floor series from Entangled, you’ll know that I like my romance to reflect real life—because internationally famous pop stars hiding out in small Iowa towns are a dime a dozen. Ha. No, because, you know, there are lots of different kinds of people in the world, and they all deserve implausible brush-with-fame happily ever afters.

But this is also a mixed traditionally- and independently-pubbed series. I have to give major, major props to Riptide for being cool with publishing a book that’s part of a series that includes books they aren’t publishing. A lot of series end up being mixed trad- and indie-pubbed when a publisher drops an author, or when a trad publisher and an author agree on something like a free novella, but this one is planned from the outset as a joint endeavour, and I’m really proud of and excited by that prospect. Because I enjoy irritating people with businessspeak jargon, I’m going to call this a “win-win.” I think by doing it this way, the series will reach more readers.

(I would also be remiss if I didn’t stop here and give a shout-out to my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan, who did not blink an eye when I said, “Hey, I want to do a series that’s part indie and part traditional and then went out and thought about all the stuff I hadn’t like, oh, for example, how the hell to handle the subrights.)

So, there you go! That’s my 2017 schedule. In 2018, I have three books coming out from Grand Central Forever and one other standalone from Riptide as part of their Queering the Classics series. Those deals were announced quite a while ago, but now that the books are actually in production, I’ll do a little 2018 update post soon—stay tuned!

Here’s half of Audra’s face that one time we drove two hours with an Ikea box shoved between our heads. It was like being in confession. Except there was nothing to say because she already knew it all.

So, my friend Audra North and I send each other a lot of emails. Like, A LOT of emails. We decided that it was a good idea to start transcribing our emails for your entertainment. (I’m not really sure why we decided that, but here we are.) So without further ado, I present you the first installment in what I hope will become a series.

AudraWhat do you think of these covers? *attaches covers-in-progress for forthcoming series* The placement of the title in the last one seems off. But I don’t know if I’m just looking at these all wonky because they’ve been in front of me for so long.

JennyI like them! I liked the closed-eyes kissing thing across the group of them. I am not the person to ask about technical things like fonts and shit, though. Want me to ask Mr. Holiday? Did I ever tell you he used to be a designer?

AudraI’ll probably sleep on the design and fiddle with it tomorrow. If Mr. Holiday has thoughts and wants to share them I’m happy to get them, but only if he really wants to or doesn’t care. As long as you don’t look at them and go OH MY GODRA NO then I know I’m close to the final version.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to take a Nyquil again tonight. I did last night because I was so stuffy and sneezy. But the thing is…I love Nyquil. I love it so much so I regulate it like crazy. Maybe once a year I’ll take half a dose for two or three nights and that’s it because it makes me feel so good. Danger Will Robinson.

JennyOh I know all about this. When I was in college, I once had a wicked head cold during finals and I discovered Theraflu. It was the only thing that allowed me to sleep. My cold went away, and I kept drinking a cup of it at night. I was like, well, it’s finals, I need all the help I can get. Then I ran out, and sure enough, that night I could not sleep. I was up, dressed, and in the elevator down to the parking lot to go and get more (I HAVE A FINAL AT 8 AM!!!), when I was like WHOA, WHOA, I have to stop this now. So I did. But to this day, I do enjoy the sleep I get when I am sick and I take night time cold meds. Then a few years later, I had to get an endoscopy and they gave me an IV of Valium and Demerol, and I was so happy it was scary. I said to Mr. Holiday, who was picking me up in his “friend” capacity (we weren’t dating yet) that I was never allowed to have those drugs again. To the extent that when they tried to give me Tylenol 3 for my week 12 miscarriage, I refused it because I thought it was a bad road to go down, knowing I would be very depressed afterwards and in possession of a bottle of T3. My point is: Mmmmm, narcotics.

AudraFriend Mr. Holiday picked you up from an endoscopy. Sweet.

I got my wisdom teeth out at 16 and got laudanum afterward. I took one. It was insanely amazing. As soon as I woke up from my trippy happy laudanum nap, I threw away the entire bottle. So I hope no junkie was going through my trash the next day because whoa. There were like 50 of those suckers left. But the way I loved it scared me shitless.

I have this mental play of Mr. Holiday that I sometimes run through when you’re talking about him. It’s where we three are sitting, playing cards, and he has a secret code while he plays and it’s basically him saying cutting sarcastic things in a gentle way. And then he wins the card game with his secret code (which is just him talking, which makes no sense because we’re all playing against each other, but somehow in my mind it makes sense). After the game is over, he sweeps up all the cards and stacks them neatly and tells us about how the Native Americans used to burn bison dung for fuel in the winter.

JennyOMG, I love you so much.

AudraI realized that sounded like I was being mean. I meant I was thinking about asking him about burning dung as a fuel source for the house (totally jokingly) because that was also super efficient and then I decided against it since he doesn’t know me well and might have thought I was either being mean or totally serious. And then he’d have to feel awkward while he said gentle sarcastic things to find out if I was actually trying to convince y’all to burn poo.

Anyway. Mr. Holiday is great. That is my overall message.

JennyLOL! In no way did I take that message as mean! It was bizarrely, delightfully you and I loved it. And he is unnaturally obsessed with light bulb efficiency, so really, is dung burning that far off?

THE NEXT MORNING…

JennyI’m sorry I never showed your covers to Mr. Holiday. He fell asleep while lying down with the kid and slept the whole night there!

How was your Nyquil?

AudraThe Nyquil was awesome and now I shall stop taking them. Because it was just so so nice.

And no worries! I’m going to go ahead with these covers. Looking at them again in the light of day, they’re good enough, so it’s lock and load time.

What’s the story for today? What are you working on?

JennyArtie and Dawn all day.

Except oh shit, I just remembered I owe a post to my publicist by the end of the day. I can’t think of anything to say. I have nothing. Can I write about my love for you and/or night time cold meds?

Audra

Um…can you imagine what that post would be like, if you wrote about how much you love what is effectively a drug?

I will give you $10 to do it.

JennyAnd I will use that $10 to be like, “One commenter will win a pack of Theraflu!”

AudraAnd then you could get a Theraflu spokesperson contract. It might compete with your Maybelline one.

JennyOr maybe the deal can be that Maybelline is so reliable that you can go on a Theraflu bender and STILL have great lashes.

Which reminds me, there was something in your book I was beta reading yesterday that made me laugh because it was totes similar to something in Artie and Dawn. But now I can’t remember what it was. I’ll just have to be surprised when you launch your lawsuit.

AudraWell, you have the upper hand of knowing what it is already so you could preemptively file your lawsuit pre-publication, even.

And good point: bender + lashes are not mutually exclusive.

Probably our voices will start to blend over time and then we’ll be able to write a joint book involving a one-armed man, a castrated duke, a redhead named Meredith, and a camping trip. It will be epic. Sylvia Day will ask us to ghost write her next series. We will refuse because we will be richer than Bill Gates, who will read our books in public.

Is it me? Or is it Rose? (It’s me.) Groom cropped out to protect the innocent.

The Engagement Game, book 3 in my 49th Floor Series, is out today! Yay! I love this book so hard! It’s definitely my favourite of the trilogy, but, oddly, it was the hardest to write. Took me the longest, needed the most intensive editing, and generally drove me the bat-shittiest! I sometimes wonder if that’s why I love it more, but I honestly don’t think so. I just think it’s the best book of the three. Why? Heck if I know. (I would make a bad critic: I’m not very good at talking about books, other than to note the way they make me feel.)

The book I hated and then loved.

It’s been a big week because in addition to having a book out, I also:

1. Went to see Taylor Swift in concert.

2. Eloped! Aka, had a super secret surprise wedding that no one knew about!

Ha! And I did both of those things in the same afternoon, practically back-to-back, with a quick stop for dinner and a change of clothes in between.

In other words, it was perfect.

But something funny occurred to me on the train ride home: the outfit I wore to my wedding was exactly the same as one worn by Rose Verma, the heroine of The Engagement Game. And this was NOT on purpose—at least not consciously-on-purpose.

In the book, Rose is on a mission to find a boyfriend—she has a deadline of sorts—so she’s internet dating with a vengeance. Between her serial dates and attending lots of high society events with the book’s hero, with whom she’s entered into a bit of an unholy alliance, she’s often dressed to the nines. Unlike me, Rose is quite a fashionista. I, when I’m not taking part in secret wedding ceremonies, am usually wearing leggings and sweatshirts.

But we do have one thing in common, which is that we like bright colours. Rose, because she has so many events and dates to attend, goes through many consume changes: emerald green dresses, blue-and-silver ballgowns—you name it. One of her outfits—one the hero takes special note of as she heads out on her date, is an electric blue dress with red heels. Now, I don’t wear heels as a matter of principle, the principle being that I enjoy not suffering. But other than that, check me out! I’m wearing Rose’s outfit!

Yep, I am wearing the same outfit as the heroine of my romance novel. It was an accident!

I think? Probably this is the part where we should call in the psychologists, but I’m going to stick with “accident.”